Organisational Behavior

Tutorial 2: Text chapter 3 - Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

1. What are the three components of an attitude? Explain. Give examples of how cognitive dissonance may arise from inconsistencies between these components.

Answer:

Cognitive component – the opinion or belief of an attitude

Affective component – the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude

Behavioral component – an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something

They are closely related, particularly cognition and affect. As a manager, you need to understand how attitudes are formed and the relationship to actual job behavior.

Cognitive Dissonance: is any incompatibility between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. Individuals seek to reduce this uncomfortable gap, or dissonance, to reach stability and consistency. Consistency is achieved by changing the attitudes, modifying the behaviors, or through rationalization. The desire to reduce dissonance depends on:

• Importance of elements

• Degree of individual influence

• Rewards involved in dissonance

Two examples:

1. Employee may take home office stationary. They know its wrong and can get in trouble if caught, but they alleviate their feelings of doing anything wrong by justifying that they don't get paid enough, or that there are so many surplus supplies stationary lying around

2. A manager who believes in not raising her voice may yell and scream at a staff member someone in anger. The theory states that the woman will either modify her beliefs about rasing her voioce to justify the aggressive or will believe her action to be something other than aggressive (for example it was frustration not agression). She may convince herself that she was acting out of instinct or self-protection rather than a desire to inflict harm, or that the provocation was so extreme that even a non aggreevie person like herself would have no choice but to respond. Individuals often seek reassurance from...